


Merry Christmas, I don't want to fight tonight

by ketchup



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Body Horror, Character(s) of Color, Christmas Fluff, Christmas Presents, Dementia, Drama, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Manipulation, Enemies to Friends, F/F, Family Bonding, First Christmas, Gen, Illnesses, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Lesbian Character, Manipulation, Memory Loss, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Queer Character, Yeerks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-22 09:47:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13164375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ketchup/pseuds/ketchup
Summary: "It had been becoming harder to get her to listen to me, for us to have a meaningful dialogue. Still, based on my track record of cooking up plans, vis a vis ice cream sandwiches, I’m willing to entertain the notion that I might be a little impulsive.  My entire scheme to get Vlio’s attention had involved throwing myself off of the ladder we’d been standing on while Vlio had been hanging Christmas lights."A minor task of holiday decorating turns into a wacky hostage situation. Drama like this is business as usual for Keandra and her Yeerk, Vlio 4597. After all their time together, squabbling and struggling to understand each other, a little Christmas cheer proves to be just what their broken relationship needs.Merry Crisis, everybody.





	Merry Christmas, I don't want to fight tonight

**Author's Note:**

> This is loosely based on a prompt from sabrina_diamond: "A controller who has been controlled most of her life suddenly becomes free at Christmas." Like so much of what I write, it got Real Gay Real Fast, and I kept fighting to make things more warm and fuzzy. 
> 
> I've never posted an Animorphs fanfic before!!! This is overdue in so many ways. If you notice any typos or other errors, don't be shy, please let me know and I'll try to fix things.

“We’re going to die here.”

Vlio spoke aloud with my mouth, to spite me as if the bitterness alone could change our fates. She was so melodramatic, so hilariously emotional, it was sometimes easy to overlook that she was only a few inches long and lived in my skull. 

_Maybe,_ I replied. Vlio had been due to feed at the local Pool that night. If I could have kept us tied up long enough, she’d begin to starve. In a few hours, I might be free, and there wouldn’t be anyone else on the planet who knew about that time I had stolen an ice cream sandwich from a bodega by shoving it directly down the front of my jeans. 

Vlio liked to use that, and other memories, to try to figure humans out, to figure me out. She sifted through all of my experiences, good and bad, as if human existence itself were the highest form of entertainment. I’d had enough pocket change to afford the ice cream. There had been no need to steal it, just like I hadn’t needed to put us into this situation that would trap us, that had brought us to what could be the final hours of Vlio’s life. 

It had been becoming harder to get her to listen to me, for us to have a meaningful dialogue. Still, based on my track record of cooking up plans, vis a vis ice cream sandwiches and pants that _had functional pockets_ , I’m willing to entertain the notion that I might be a little impulsive. My entire scheme to get Vlio’s attention had involved throwing myself off of the ladder we’d been standing on while Vlio had been hanging Christmas lights. 

I’m not self-destructive. Sometimes life gives you lemons, sometimes life gives you two seconds to decide what to do with the stupid thing you’re going to shoplift, and sometimes life gives you a parasitic alien slug who controls your body. I’ve never shied away from difficulty. If life dealt me a shitty hand, I’d find a way to make it work, or at least get through the mess. 

As it was, we’d gotten tangled up in the long strands of wires and glass bulbs, my legs and arms bundled up just enough that we remained locked in a stalemate on the cold, mostly dead lawn. Since we were behind the tall shrubs that surrounded the small ranch house that I shared with my mother, it was highly unlikely that any of my neighbors would spot us come to our aid. 

“I could stay in here until the end,” Vlio muttered, somehow deluded enough to think that I’d be intimidated by her. “I could ruin you, explode into pus and death and destroy your brain until you couldn’t walk or talk ever again.” 

In the same way that Vlio knew that I’d stolen the ice cream just to see if I could do it, I knew that she wouldn’t hurt me. She was loud and frequently vitriolic, well-equipped with an endless supply of vulgarity and violence, but at her core, she was sentimental, too. She hated me, but she was so in love with life and human experiences that she wouldn’t kill me. It was a major part of why she’d taken the risk to join the Peace Movement, after all. 

Instead of dignifying her empty threat with a reply, I considered how long I could convince Isker that I was still a Controller. Vlio clenched my jaw, struggled to get her next words out as fury burned her up. 

“She won’t fall for it. You can’t pretend to be me.” 

I could, at least for the day or so that it would take to catch Isker off guard, maybe tie up Nicole and starve her Yeerk out of her, too. Vlio shut my eyes and let out a long, frustrated sigh. I wouldn’t have actually killed Isker. That would have cost the Peace Movement one of its greatest allies. I almost wanted to apologize. 

Almost. Knowing that the threat had hurt Vlio, made her unsteady, stopped me, though. 

An icy tinge in the air made my nose twitch in a way that was beyond Vlio’s control. It made her grimace She opened my eyes so she could glare up at the sky. From above, a single, fat snowflake fluttered down and landed on my cheek. 

I’d told her it was going to snow. She had spent hours searching my memories, trying to grasp if it was truly possible that I could smell the weather. She was surprisingly easy to distract. In those moments, I could do things like force my eyes to move, or twitch my lip. Eventually, my control had grown. Not to anything like full speech, but more like a full jerk of my arm, or, say, forcing a step in the wrong direction. 

The sort of misstep that could send my body toppling down a ladder, for example. 

I couldn’t lift my arm to look at my digital wrist watch, but based on how dark it had gotten, I figured our time together was running short. Flurries continued to drift down, sometimes to land on my face. I was content to let Vlio get lost in worries, memories, and anxiety. 

“Listen.” 

I obviously had no choice. Still, Vlio worked to make my voice sound desperate, to put every ounce of emotion into her inflection. It was irritating in a familiar, familial way, like how my older brother used to lick his toys to keep me from playing with them. 

Vlio went silent again, weighing her words before pressing onwards. “Stop fighting me for control. This is just going to get both of us hurt. Isker and Nicole need us. Don’t do this.” 

Isker and Nicole were as peaceful working together as Vlio and I were turbulent. It was a fair to say that their presence might have defused our current situation, but I didn’t want that. I wanted Vlio to dangle there with me, our leg caught in a snarl of Christmas lights while we slowly became buried in snow together. If she was going to needle at me by making my voice sound extra whiny, or by doing any of the other countless things that she did just to try to keep me away from the controls, I’d just have to push back at her harder. 

I might be a somewhat unpleasant person, who evolved from being a thoroughly unpleasant child, but at least I’ve learned that when someone licks their really cool Hot Wheels car, you can pick it up and play with it anyway. 

Being a host to a Yeerk wasn’t awful because you lost control of your life. They still had to act enough like you, they had to go through the motions of the life you had chosen. In fact, with how dull my line of work was, I didn’t mind that someone else had to sit through meetings at the office and earn my paycheck. In many ways, Vlio was a better worker than I was, better equipped to fight my brain’s quirks. I got to space out and disassociate, she got a host body. 

I had heard from other Controllers in the Yeerk Peace Movement that many host minds cowered, wept, begged. I couldn’t imagine doing such things. They were a waste of energy, and besides which, they were boring ways to deal with our situation. I never was much of a crier, anyway. When someone broke my heart, I’d burn all of our love letters and go out to a club instead of weeping into a pint of ice cream. So, when Vlio came into my life, I think I was pretty well-equipped for fighting back against her when I needed to. 

Over time, though, Vlio had begun to do small things that had driven me to really, truly hate her. It was one thing to force me to eat shrimp; it was another matter to eat shrimp, just to see if my elderly, addled mother could recall that it was my most hated food. 

I didn’t hate Yeerks. I hated _my_ Yeerk. 

There’s definitely something to be said about how we were both antagonistic by nature. If I’d had another Yeerk, one like Isker or Illim, I doubt they would have driven me to theatrics such as a leap off of a ladder and a brush with death. 

God, we were preposterous. 

Vlio sighed again. She tried to reach down for where my leg was tangled in the string of lights, but I wrestled her for control. My arm twitched, my torso bent enough that my hand could have reached the wires, but I kept my hand clenched in an ineffectual fist. 

“You say that you hate me, but you do the same things I do. You always have. You push boundaries, you knock things over just to see them fall, and you’re just mad because I’m the same way.” 

I kept my fists clenched. Vlio writhed on the ground, tried to wiggle or roll my body out from behind the shrubs. I willed my body to thrash in the opposite direction, and wrestled enough control from her to clench my teeth. 

“Dammit. I’ll stop eating shrimp. Just. Stop this.” 

_This isn’t about the goddamn shrimp,_ I hissed to her. _I don’t care if you try to bother me. I can fight back all day, and you fucking know it._

“Oh, I do fucking know it,” Vlio grumbled. She gave up on the thrashing and focused on maintaining control over my mouth. She also flipped through several memories, times when I’d reigned over a person or a situation by being an asshole, probably trying to seek out some weakness or failure. 

She didn’t find many. I wasn’t irreproachable. I always overbaked my macaroni and cheese and forgot to do laundry until I ran out of socks. I had flaws, but I wasn’t someone who lost fights, dammit. 

I had to get my issue with her out there, though, before I could let us return to our usual amount of bickering instead of this bullshit impasse in the snow. For one, my fingers were starting to go numb, and for another thing, she was distracted. I always got the best results out of her when she was distracted. 

_**This** is about how you find ways to confuse my mother. She’s sick. You don’t need to unsettle her more than she already is._

“Oh, and that merits trying to murder me? You’re going to murder me because I was curious about your mother’s affliction?” 

_Go read a book. Talk to me about it. You don’t need to be an asshole._

“What’s that human phrase? ‘Takes one to know one’?” 

The snow was really starting to come down. Before much longer, we might have become too numb to move, and even skin as dark as mine would have been truly buried. I had started to think that the plan would backfire I heard the sound of a car door shutting. 

“Keandra?” 

Nicole and Isker had arrived, their tiny car parked in my driveway. I tried to remember if Vlio had made plans with the pair, to drive to the Pool together, but Isker’s feeding cycle had always been a day off from hers. When Nicole’s crunchy bootfalls approached my body lying tangled in the snow, Vlio shouted. She was so distraught, it came out as just a yelp. 

I don’t know if I was ever more mortified than I was in that moment. 

It was usually easy to tell who was in control, if you knew Isker and Nicole were separate minds in one body; Isker tended to have a knot between her brows, and Nicole laughed much more often. Most of the things she said had the edge of laughter to them, like she thought the whole world was a little bit hilarious. 

Nicole blinked her big, brown eyes and pressed her lips together to resist laughing at us. “Wow, this is…even worse than Veronica guessed it might be.” 

A disgusted grunt slipped out of my lips, and even I couldn’t discern who had controlled the reaction. Nicole began fussing to untangle my body from the Christmas lights, while Vlio and I began an internal dialogue about how annoying Veronica was. 

_I hate when Isker conspires with that metallic mongrel,_ Vlio grumbled to me. 

_She’s fucking nosy,_ I agreed. _The Chee shouldn’t have been allowed into the Movement. They don’t do anything except gossip._

It wasn’t an unbiased assessment, as the Chee were some of the greatest surveillance resources for the Peace Movement, but Vlio and I had a history with the Chee. 

_They’re awful._

 _They’re cowards and always smell like wet dog._

“Are you two having one of your hate-spewing makeout sessions,” Nicole asked, sounding far too chipper. She’d just about finished getting us free from the wires. Her small, soft hands were tucked away inside bright colored knit mittens. 

Nicole wrapped both of my hands up, in between the warmth of her own. When Vlio glared at her, Nicole just laughed. “Whenever you get that vacant look in your eyes, I can tell you’re getting along, however briefly, and even if it’s just to be angry at something besides each other.” 

“We weren’t getting along,” Vlio said in a vexed rush. She snatched my hands away from Nicole’s grasp, and stood. My left leg was asleep, so instead of standing tall, my body swayed a little. I must have looked pathetic, because Nicole stood and began cleaning up the mess of wires. 

By the time the ladder was back in my garage and all the unhung lights were wrapped up in a neat bundle, my body was shivering. Isker made eye contact with me, and lead the way inside the house. My jacket was soaked through, so she took it when Vlio shrugged it off of my shoulders, and brought it to the bathroom to hang up to dry. 

_You could have died out there. Just from the cold, never mind the fall._

_Yeah,_ I thought, suddenly realizing how exhausted I was from the whole ordeal. It really had been stupid. Worse yet, I didn’t think that it had made Vlio care one bit about how everything with my mother had been stressing me out. 

Vlio walked my body into the living room, where my mother was sitting in her recliner with a large-print crossword puzzle book open in her lap. She was asleep, and probably hadn’t even heard the ruckus of my topple off the ladder in the front yard. 

There was a mirror mounted on the wall above the gas fireplace in my living room. My house was comfortable, mostly for my mother’s benefit, but it wasn’t huge. The mirror usually helped to offset the inadequate amount of windows in the room. In it, Vlio stared at my face, studying it. 

When I had first become her host, Vlio had some concerns about what kind of human with which she’d been saddled. I’m not certain what she’d hoped for in a host. She didn’t talk much about any past hosts she’d had, but I’d gotten the impression that she was disappointed in me somehow, maybe because I was a woman. 

The first time she experienced the full impact of my shittiness, it had made her complain about wanting a new host. That wasn’t something a Yeerk could do easily, but Vlio was obviously capable of being stubborn. Her resentment had driven her to fight for rank, to become a Sub-Visser. She became so ambitious that she’d been considered for reassignment to a host down south, closer to the invasion’s epicenter. 

In the end, though, she’d let the opportunity slip past her. 

In the end, I was still her host. 

From behind us, I could hear Nicole and Isker’s return. Vlio finally looked away from my face and turned to smile at the other women. I finally realized that Isker had one of Veronica’s weird briefcases with her, one of the portable Kandrona setups that were still so scarce within the Peace Movement. My mind completely slipped from the controls over my body, and Vlio let out a relieved laugh. 

Isker nodded to us, and lead the way to my bedroom. “You’ll have just tonight, just long enough for Vlio to feed.” 

If I’d been in control of my body, my heart would have been racing. Thankfully, Vlio took care of everything in those next moments. On top of my dresser, Nicole and Isker opened the briefcase and set things up just so. Since Isker was one of the scientists who maintained the local Pool, she was well prepared to make arrangements for her fellow Yeerk to be comfortable. 

Vlio went to the dresser, lowered my head towards the mixing-bowl sized basin of liquid where she’d float, vulnerable and alone, for the next several hours. 

_Merry Christmas, asshole._

Her parting words to me were cruel, as the words and thoughts we shared tended to be, but I knew her. 

Vlio was loud and frequently vitriolic, but at her core, she was sentimental. I wouldn’t dare to presume that she loved me. As I resumed full control of my body and looked down at the liquid to watch Vlio swim around, I knew that she at least loved hating me. 

“I didn’t even get you a gift,” I grumbled to my Yeerk. She couldn’t hear me, which was oddly distressing. I stepped away from the dresser and reacclimated to fully being back in my body. It was dizzying, and the rush of emotion that Vlio had dumped onto me wasn’t helping my discombobulation. 

Nicole approached me, and held out a hand, offering to help. She waited until I agreed before slipping her arm around me and leading me out into the hallway. “Isker and I already ordered delivery from your mom’s favorite restaurant. Would you like me to join you?” 

I twisted to look at her. Nicole was beaming, her wide smile framed by her voluminous hair. “Just you?” 

“Just me. I think your Christmas gift to Vlio can be letting her hang out in the Kandrona hot tub with Isker.” 

“Gross.” 

Nicole laughed, a gentle, bell-like sound. “You’re so silly. It’s beautiful. Why don’t you go turn on the tree’s lights? I’ll join you shortly.” She patted me on the shoulder, sent me walking alone, on my way towards the living room where my mother was still dozing. 

I knelt down and plugged in the lights on our Christmas tree. In a twinkling daze of rainbow lights, I stood and crossed to my mother. With a gentle kiss on her dark-skinned brow, I woke her up. 

For the first few seconds, she had that lost, confused look in her gray eyes. I fought my urge to frown, to get angry, and waited for her to remember where she was. Even though we’d lived together for almost a decade in the house I’d bought for us, every morning had become a struggle. Some days, I’d get home from work and she’d ask why I was so late getting home from school. Every time, it crushed me more than the thought of losing the war. Navigating our deteriorating relationship scared me more than anything I’d done as a member of the Peace Movement. 

But then, she spotted the tree, its lights, the wrapped presents. Realization and memories came back to her in a flood that illuminated her face with a calm smile. My mother grabbed my hand and pulled herself up to her feet. She patted me on the cheek, then pinched it just so. 

“Keandra, you little devil. You almost let me sleep through Christmas.” 

“You were tired, mama.” I considered telling her that I was worried about her, about how she seemed frailer with each day, but that was the kind of mawkish confession that Vlio would have made. I forced myself to look stern. 

The expression just made my mother erupt into laughter. She cracked up, laughing her deep, strong laugh that I hadn’t heard in months. “You always get that look on your face when you’re trying to boss everyone around.” She waggled one finger, then booped me on the nose like I was a toddler again. “Silly girl. I’m never too tired to open some presents. Let’s get this Christmas started already.” 

By the time Nicole joined us in the living room with a trio of mugs held in her hands, my mother and I were sitting in front of the tree, surrounded by mountains of crumpled wrapping paper. Worry flashed through my blood, but my mom’s lucidity didn’t waver. She retrieved a present in the pile with Nicole’s name on it, prepared to pass it along to my companion. 

“Thank you,” Nicole said with unshed tears choking her up. She plopped down with us and got a cheek pat-pinch combo from my mother, too, before distributing the mugs. “I made cocoa.” 

Cocoa before Christmas dinner was an old family tradition, something so small that I’d overlooked it. I’d been so busy pouncing on Vlio and making trouble that I’d almost let the holiday slip by me. 

I’d signed my life away to the Peace Movement, to being a Controller. If I was going to let the things that mattered most to me slip by, what was the damn point of any of it? Maybe Vlio, with all of her maudlin, idiotic nonsense, was right about some things. Maybe I could stand to let her show me more about myself, about what being human could be, even if it hurt. 

Nicole lifted her mug to me in a toast. With how the lights on the tree made everything soft and sparkly, it was suddenly so easy to see why Vlio got lost in those doe eyes, especially when Isker was the one controlling them. 

“Merry Christmas, Keandra.” 

“Merry Christmas, Nicole.” 

My mother raised her mug as well, and clinked it against Nicole’s and my own in quick succession. 

“Merry Christmas!” She winked at me, and raised a brow at how I’d turned to mush when Nicole had joined us. 

Usually, I would have grit my teeth and frowned at the insinuation. Instead, I just smiled, and watched reverently as Nicole unwrapped her present. Vlio had gotten the necklace for Isker, but it made Nicole beam. She held it up so that the pendant shimmered in the light, which made my mom slap my knee and joke about how it was a nicer gift than any of hers. Before I could stop myself, I laughed. It would all make for a beautiful memory to share with Vlio, to keep us focused on why we had to win the war.


End file.
